1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method for rapid robotic pick up and delivery of articles. The subject of this patent application is a system designed to allow robots the capability of pick up and delivery with a minimum of moving parts
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
The transportation of articles within a structure, or between multiple structures has posed, to some degree, a problem since the industrial revolution. Many transportation options exist today as commercially available products, for example, conveyer belts, pneumatic tubes, gimbled carts, and mobile robots. Mobile robots, or Autonomous Guided Vehicles, are vehicles that have been equipped with a drive system under computer control which allows autonomous guidance between two locations.
The recent availability of sophisticated computing capabilities accessible at the size of a computer chip, has created a revival of the mobile robot field after its introduction in the 1960s, followed by a languishing market in the late 1980s. Initially, robots were used in industrial plants where they became an obvious choice for moving material over greater distances than conveyer belts could reasonably perform. Although, there is significant economic incentive to introduce mobile robots into hospitals and laboratories, relatively little progress has been made towards using mobile robots to deliver hospital supplies or even participate in the process of laboratory analysis. For example, the physical movement of medical specimens, pharmaceuticals, blood products, patient charts, x-rays, and meals cost over 1 million dollars annually for hospitals with over 500 beds. In buildings where laboratories are spread out over a large geographic area, specimen delivery can account for a large percentage of technologist time. Pharmaceutical laboratories process large numbers of samples and transportation of these samples can readily be standardized to be compatible with mobile robots.
Many laboratories are not yet organized in a streamlined fashion because technologists must react to the changing numbers of laboratory requests, additional processing steps, and problem specimens. Providing conveyance to and from laboratories requires flexibility in order to accommodate the changing analytical requests.
Other industries can benefit from mobile robot technology equipped with automatic pick up and delivery. Currently large corporations employ one or more people to pick up and deliver inter and intraoffice mail or deliver supplies. It is recognized that office automation is a more economical approach and the office automation market is predicted to be a multibillion-dollar industry in the next century. Automatic office delivery will improve the efficiency of today's workforce by providing low cost, predictable and error free delivery of office mail and supplies.
The problem, to date, has not been moving the material, but rather the economic pick up and delivery without human intervention. Although having mobile robots move material from one place to another saves substantial manpower, it is often counteracted by the need of personnel to be present to load and unload the robot. By providing a pick up and delivery system that requires no human participation, the system becomes highly economical and convenient for all employees.